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Is Haskell the Cure?

mathias-biilmann.net

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Re: Is Haskell the Cure?

#21

Post by alexatkeplar »

bobfunk wrote: post #5
dorian-graph wrote: post #2

Hasn't the author already said that the measuring of Fibonacci was not the point of his tirade? Which makes the line in this post 'I think a lot of people missed the main point of Dziuba's troll" slightly amusing. Is there now going to be someone running this 'benchmark' in whatever language they can? One of the blogs already posted said he's going to find time to run it in C. I'll do my part. Delphi, here I come. ;)

My benchmark was mostly a parody, since Haskell just memoized the call and never really did the work. The point of the article was more the difference between the languages that really tackles concurrency (Haskell, Clojure, Go, Erlang) and Node's way of simply offering one solution that works for a lot of problems where the common scripting languages (especially PHP) doesn't work that well.

Don't forget Akka (esp Scala-Akka) in that list!

Re: Is Haskell the Cure?

#22

Post by megaman821 »

I don't think the point of Ted Dziuba's rant was that every request is a large calculation. In Node.js if most results are small and generated quickly when one large calculation request comes in all the small ones stop going out until it is done. A Haskell web server like Snap should not have this problem.

Re: Is Haskell the Cure?

#23

Post by kennystone »

What's more important is applying some important concepts in haskell - functional programming and dividing your program into tiny self-contained parts. You can write this way in most languages - Ruby, Python, Scala, etc. The fancier parts of Haskell - lazy evaluation, static typing, whatever - are less important to making software that works than its functional nature.

Re: Is Haskell the Cure?

#25

Post by thesz »

stonemetal wrote: post #15
Peaker wrote: post #6

It is somewhat of a shame that learning curve plays such a significant role for career programmers. You would expect that people that spend years and years working with their tools would be willing to put a few weeks or months into learning their most important tool: the programming language. It seems most programmers get frustrated and abandon learning of different programming paradigms very quickly.

Not to be to contrarian but until I see proof to the contrary I think Norvig put said it best: In terms of programming-in-the-large, at Google and elsewhere, I think that language choice is not as important as all the other choices: if you have the right overall architecture, the right team of programmers, the right development process that allows for rapid development with continuous improvement, then many languages…

Architecture heavily depends on the language. You have to make different choices for C++ than for Java, not mentioning Haskell.

Also, I think that comma before "the right" in Norvig statements means logical AND. If we rewrite that statement it will look like that: if you have the right overall architecture AND the right team of programmers AND the right development process that allows for rapid development with continuous improvement, then many languages will work for you.

I think it is too many AND's here. In most realistic situations you cannot have such luxury.

Also, choice of Haskell (or similar language) allows you to address at least two points from Norvig statement: the right team and right development process.

Those who learned and applied Haskell almost cannot form the wrong team. Almost - as we cannot rule out failure completely.

The right development process is almost ensured by strong type system. Type systems like Haskell's can be viewed as a tool to spread requirement changes through complete program.

(that's why it is seemed hard to introduce or change a constructor in a data type)

So all in all I think that languages make a difference here. For many languages you should fulfill those three points, for some languages those points fulfill themselves.

Re: Is Haskell the Cure?

#26

Post by gregwebs »

substack wrote: post #10

I gave haskell a shot as some of my earlier github repos indicate: https://github.com/substack . I even wrote my blog in haskell with happstack, since snap hadn't gotten popular yet. Haskell is very hard, but even after 3 years of pretty intensive use, I never really felt productive with haskell in the same way that I've felt in other languages. Anything I did in haskell required a lot of thinking up-front and tinker…

I believe you are attributing a library issue to a language. Before today (and by today I literally mean a month ago when Yesod released a cross-platform development server that automatically re-compiles your web application) there wasn't a productive set of libraries and tools to build a web application with in Haskell. 3 years ago when you started, and even until 1-2 years ago the library situation was absolutely horrible. Web frameworks with very little to offer, mediocre templating languages, not even an attempt at a database ORM. Tutorials would have you write a bunch of code to achieve a detail taken for granted in libraries used in web frameworks of other languages.

Please take a look at doing real-world, productive web development with Yesod. http://www.yesodweb.com

You are still going to take a productivity hit in Haskell due to lack of libraries in comparison to Ruby, Python, etc. So the practical reason for using Haskell today is to take advantage of the amazing performance, take advantage of Haskell non-web libraries in the backend, or for a high assurance project where its type system can rule out most common web development bugs.

oh, and Yesod is even faster than the mentioned Snap framework which is already much faster than Node (and unlike Haskell, Node does not scale to multi-core). Although Yesod isn't going to automatically cache the fibonacci sequence for this artificial benchmark because in the real world I have never once been tasked with writing code like that for a web application.

Re: Is Haskell the Cure?

#27

Post by thesz »

agentultra wrote: post #16

I don't think Haskell itself is really the answer. If I read the article correctly it's simply a matter of concurrency and parallelism that's important. There are a host of languages that do that quite well and Haskell just happens to be one of them.

How those languages fare in other fields, like, constraint programming?

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/monadiccp

The real point is that Haskell is quite good in many areas and is excellent in parallelism and concurrency. While other languages are excellent in concurrency and not so good in other areas.

Those many languages are the answer for the sole field of concurrency and Haskell is the answer when you combine many fields, one of which could happen to be concurrency.

Re: Is Haskell the Cure?

#28

Post by gtani »

alexatkeplar wrote: post #21
bobfunk wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My benchmark was mostly a parody, since Haskell just memoized the call and never really did the work. The point of the article was more the difference between the languages that really tackles concurrency (Haskell, Clojure, Go, Erlang) and Node's way of simply offering one solution that works for a lot of problems where the common scripting languages (especially PHP) doesn't work that well.

Don't forget Akka (esp Scala-Akka) in that list!

I just put up a [[actors in _ lang]] list

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7566548/actor-based-distr...

Re: Is Haskell the Cure?

#29

Post by agentultra »

thesz wrote: post #27
agentultra wrote: post #16

I don't think Haskell itself is really the answer. If I read the article correctly it's simply a matter of concurrency and parallelism that's important. There are a host of languages that do that quite well and Haskell just happens to be one of them.

How those languages fare in other fields, like, constraint programming? http://hackage.haskell.org/package/monadiccp The real point is that Haskell is quite good in many areas and is excellent in parallelism and concurrency. While other languages are excellent in concurrency and not so good in other areas. Those many languages are the answer for the sole field of concurrency and Haskell is the answer when you combine…

Sure Haskell is good for more than just concurrent programming, but the article was leaning on concurrency and parallelism in its comparison with Node.js

And I should also point out that said "blub" languages can also implement those features which they lack that Haskell includes by design. Some have better features than Haskell, IMO (ie: Qi/Shen sequent types and the ability to turn the type system off when you don't need it).

Again, Haskell is a good language. I just don't see it as a "cure." There are many other options.

Re: Is Haskell the Cure?

#30

Post by [deleted] »

microtonal wrote: post #20
Jach wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe most programmers who bother to look up different paradigms. My experience is that most programmers overall aren't even aware of different paradigms, let alone that things could be better: they're taught what they're taught in school or at home and don't move beyond. I've heard the phrase "Well if you know C++ you know it all" at least three times.

You must have never done any meta-programming in C++ ;). It's pretty much a functional language. Also, STL provides some infrastructure for FP-like programming (defining functors, argument binding, and providing map/fold-like transformations). But given that C++98 didn't provide lambda functions, it was all a bit too painful.

[deleted]
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